Fairness Perceptions of an Organizational Policy

Abstract

The Fairness Perceptions of an Organizational Policy scale, developed by organizational psychologist Steven L. Grover (1991), is a psychometric instrument designed to assess employee attitudes regarding the justice and legitimacy of family-responsive workplace interventions—specifically, paid parental leave policies. As organizations increasingly adopt human resource practices targeting specific demographic segments, evaluating how both direct beneficiaries and non-beneficiary coworkers evaluate the fairness of these initiatives has become essential to organizational justice research. The instrument consists of 9 items operationalizing three conceptual dimensions: core distributive fairness perceptions (2 items), parental deservingness (3 items), and institutional responsibility (4 items). Despite its multidimensional conceptual foundation, empirical psychometric evaluations indicate that the scale exhibits a robust unidimensional factor structure, capturing an overarching evaluative schema of policy justice. Responses are gathered across a 7-point Likert-type continuum ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (agree strongly), incorporating four reverse-scored statements to mitigate acquiescence bias. In its initial validation cohort of university faculty members and administrative personnel, the scale demonstrated excellent internal consistency, yielding a Cronbach’s alpha of .95. Construct validity was corroborated via statistically significant positive associations with attitudes toward male and female leave-takers, self-interest markers (e.g., childbearing age, female gender, prospective childbearing intentions, and anticipated parental leave uptake), and broader ideological endorsements of corporate social responsibility. The scale remains a foundational tool for researchers and human resource practitioners examining workplace equity, work-family balance, corporate policy adoption, and potential backlash among non-parent employees.

Keywords

organizational justice, fairness perceptions, parental leave policy, distributive justice, institutional responsibility, parental deservingness, work-family conflict, employee attitudes, Grover 1991, psychometrics

Authors

The scale was developed and empirically validated by Steven L. Grover, Ph.D.

• Affiliation at Time of Publication: Department of Management, College of Business Administration, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States.
• Current Academic Profile: Professor of Management and Organizational Behavior, Department of Management, Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
• Scholarly Focus: Organizational justice, ethical decision-making, lying and deception in organizations, workplace trust, and the intersection of employee personal lives and organizational practices.
• Contact Information: Research inquiries regarding the primary source investigation may be directed via institutional scholarly channels at Macquarie University or through academic repositories archiving the American Psychological Association publication.

Purpose

Organizational policies do not operate within an evaluative vacuum. When contemporary organizations introduce targeted social interventions, such as paid parental leave, flexible work arrangements, or family-supportive fringe benefits, employees continuously evaluate the legitimacy, moral appropriateness, and distributive fairness of these organizational choices. The Fairness Perceptions of an Organizational Policy measure was developed by Grover (1991) to capture employee evaluations of a targeted policy: leave granted to parents immediately following the birth or adoption of a child. The central purpose of this instrument is to provide an empirically validated, psychometrically rigorous methodology to quantify how employees appraise an organizational policy that selectively allocates resources—specifically time and financial compensation—to a defined subgroup of the workforce.

From an applied human resource management perspective, organizations risk operational disruption, interpersonal conflict, and reduced organizational citizenship behaviors if non-beneficiary employees perceive specialized benefit systems as preferential treatment or reverse discrimination. The instrument enables organizational diagnosticians to evaluate workplace sentiment prior to, during, or following the rollout of family-supportive programs. Specifically, it can determine whether non-childbearing employees harbor resentment regarding coworker resource allocation, assess the perceived legitimacy of employer-funded caretaking provisions, and identify potential demographic cleavages between childbearing-age personnel and older or childless colleagues.

From a theoretical and academic standpoint, the scale addresses the complex psychological tension between self-interest models of justice and ideological or normative value systems. By quantifying whether individuals view parental leave as a basic entitlement, a corporate duty, or an unjust subsidy, researchers can isolate the determinants of policy endorsement. The instrument has broad applicability across social psychology, industrial-organizational psychology, and labor relations, providing empirical clarity on how public policies and private employer initiatives are perceived through lenses of justice, moral obligation, and collective welfare.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the instrument is the perceived fairness of an organizational social benefit policy. Fairness in this context refers to cognitive and evaluative appraisals of the morality, equity, and societal alignment of granting organizational resources to parents. Although empirical evaluation demonstrates that the 9 items form a unified construct, Grover (1991) structured the scale around three distinct, interrelated theoretical dimensions:

1. Core Fairness Perceptions

This dimension encompasses direct evaluative judgments regarding whether the allocation of paid leave to childbearing or adoptive employees violates traditional equity or comparative treatment standards. It assesses whether non-recipients view the policy as an unfair distribution of institutional compensation. For instance, Item 1 operationalizes the sentiment that compensating faculty or employees for giving birth is fundamentally inequitable to individuals who do not have children, while Item 8 evaluates retrospective unfairness—the belief that because past generations of employees managed childbearing without specialized benefits, granting paid leave to contemporary workers violates historical comparative equity.

2. Parental Deservingness

The second dimension reflects the attribution of moral worth, merit, and need to parents facing childbirth. This facet taps into the social-psychological construct of entitlement based on social contributions and human strain. Rather than evaluating the policy solely through economic inputs and organizational outputs, deservingness considers childbearing as an arduous life transition that justifies institutional aid. Items reflecting this construct affirm that “every parent deserves the right to paid leave when a child is born” (Item 2) and emphasize that “having a child is a strain on parents, and they deserve the aid of parental leave” (Item 5). This dimension contrasts an individualistic perspective of personal choice with a communal view of legitimate dependency.

3. Institutional Responsibility

The third dimension evaluates ideological beliefs regarding the boundary between private family obligations and corporate civic responsibilities. This facet examines whether organizations are viewed merely as contractual economic entities or as social institutions embedded within a broader communal fabric. It assesses the degree to which respondents endorse the premise that children are a collective societal good, justifying corporate subsidy. Items explore whether respondents believe “it is everyone’s, including non-parents, responsibility to provide for children” (Item 3), whether “it is the responsibility of large institutions… to help in the effort” (Item 6), or conversely, whether childbearing remains an exclusively personal choice that should not be subsidized by non-parents (Item 7) or employers (Items 4 and 9).

Theoretical Framework

The instrument is grounded in the convergence of organizational justice theory, social allocation norms, and social-cognitive models of self-interest versus symbolic attitudes.

Organizational Justice and Allocation Norms

Organizational justice classically differentiates between distributive justice (fairness of resource outcomes), procedural justice (fairness of decision-making processes), and interactional justice (interpersonal treatment). Grover’s scale focuses centrally on distributive justice, but introduces nuances beyond standard equity theory. Classic equity theory, advanced by J. Stacy Adams (1965), posits that individuals assess fairness by comparing their ratio of organizational inputs (e.g., effort, skill, tenure) to outcomes (e.g., pay, promotions, benefits) against a referent other. Under a strict equity model, providing paid leave to parents appears problematic because parental status does not necessarily correlate with greater professional work input; non-parents performing identical labor receive fewer overall paid days of absence.

However, social justice theorists—such as Morton Deutsch (1975)—argue that equity is only one of three primary distributive norms; the others are equality (allocating equal resources regardless of contribution) and need (allocating resources based on legitimate biological or social necessity). Grover’s scale captures the operational friction between an equity allocation norm and a need-based allocation norm. Individuals who endorse the policy prioritize need and collective social reproduction over input-based ratios.

Self-Interest Model vs. Symbolic Value Model

The framework integrates two prominent perspectives in political and organizational sociology:

• The Economic Self-Interest Model: Predicts that individuals assess policy fairness based on direct personal utility. Those who stand to benefit personally—women, employees of reproductive age, and individuals planning future childbearing—judge parental leave policies as fairer than employees who cannot utilize the benefit.
• The Symbolic Values Model: Asserts that fairness judgments stem from deeply internalized ideological values, gender role orientations, and beliefs about corporate social responsibility. Under this model, an individual without personal interest in parental leave may still judge the policy as exceptionally fair if they subscribe to collectivist or family-supportive ideologies.

Validity

Empirical validation of the Fairness Perceptions of an Organizational Policy scale was established in Grover’s (1991) landmark investigation involving 351 faculty members at a major comprehensive state university undergoing parental leave policy deliberations. The empirical evidence provides rigorous support across construct, convergent, and predictive validity domains.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was corroborated by testing theoretical propositions derived from the self-interest model and value-orientation frameworks. In line with psychometric predictions, Grover (1991) demonstrated that perceived fairness correlated significantly with key demographic and psychological indicators of direct personal utility:

• Gender: Female respondents reported significantly higher fairness ratings than male respondents (r = .24, p < .001), consistent with structural gender roles surrounding postpartum infant care.
• Biological/Age Status: Being of childbearing age (defined as under 40 years old) was positively correlated with higher perceived fairness (r = .29, p < .001).
• Behavioral Intentions: Anticipated future childbearing exhibited a robust positive correlation with fairness perceptions (r = .38, p < .001), and the subjective likelihood of taking parental leave if made available was strongly related to policy fairness (r = .50, p < .001).

Attitudinal Associations and Predictive Validity

The scale demonstrated significant convergent and predictive associations with social and occupational attitudes toward leave-takers. Perceived policy fairness correlated positively with favorable evaluations of female colleagues who take parental leave (r = .40, p < .001) as well as male colleagues who take parental leave (r = .38, p < .001). Furthermore, multiple regression analyses confirmed that even when controlling for personal self-interest variables, broader attitudinal variables (such as egalitarian sex-role attitudes and support for coworker wellbeing) retained significant independent explanatory power, confirming that the scale captures both self-interested utility and altruistic/normative justice dimensions.

Reliability

The psychometric evaluation of the instrument demonstrates exceptional internal consistency reliability across empirical samples:

• Internal Consistency: In the initial development sample of 351 academic employees, Grover (1991) reported an overall Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .95. This high value indicates a high degree of inter-item covariance, confirming that the 9 items reliably reflect a single dominant operational construct.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations across the validation cohort ranged consistently from moderate-to-high (generally above .65), demonstrating that each statement contributes significantly to total score variance without redundant or collinear degradation.
• Split-Half and Temporal Considerations: While temporal test-retest reliability was not originally reported due to cross-sectional sampling constraints during an active policy rollout, the high alpha statistic indicates that the composite score exhibits minimal measurement error. Subsequent organizational studies adapting the Grover measure across corporate sectors have routinely replicated alpha coefficients ranging between .88 and .94.

Factor Analysis

Grover (1991) conducted exploratory factor analytic (EFA) procedures to ascertain whether the conceptual distinctions between core fairness, parental deservingness, and institutional responsibility represented empirical subscales or a single construct:

Exploratory Factor Structure

The 9 items were subjected to principal components analysis followed by orthogonal and oblique factor rotation. Despite the theoretical distinction among three conceptual facets, the empirical analysis unequivocally yielded a single-factor solution:

• Eigenvalues and Explained Variance: A single dominant factor emerged, accounting for the vast majority of the common variance across the item matrix (eigenvalue substantially exceeding conventional retention criteria).
• Item Loadings: All 9 items exhibited substantial factor loadings on the primary unrotated dimension (with primary loadings typically exceeding .70). Items tapping corporate duty (e.g., Item 6) loaded harmoniously alongside direct fairness appraisals (e.g., Item 1) and personal deservingness assessments (e.g., Item 5).

This outcome indicates that in cognitive policy appraisal, employees do not compartmentalize personal deservingness, corporate responsibility, and abstract fairness into disparate operational silos. Instead, employees adopt an integrated evaluative mindset: individuals who deem parental leave to be fair simultaneously believe that parents deserve institutional support and that corporate entities share an obligation to support social reproduction.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

Below are the structural specifications, scoring directions, and administrative parameters of the measurement tool:

• Instrument Name: Fairness Perceptions of an Organizational Policy Scale
• Original Author: Steven L. Grover (1991)
• Construct Assessed: Perceived fairness, deservingness, and institutional responsibility regarding parental leave workplace policies
• Format: 9-item self-report questionnaire
• Target Population: Working adults, organizational employees, human resource policy recipients, and general workforces
• Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes
• Response Continuum: 7-point Likert-type scale:
• 1 = Strongly disagree
• 2 = Disagree somewhat
• 3 = Disagree a little
• 4 = Neither agree nor disagree
• 5 = Agree a little
• 6 = Agree somewhat
• 7 = Agree strongly
• Scoring Protocol:
• Items 1, 4, 8, and 9 are negatively phrased and must be reverse-scored prior to aggregation (i.e., 1 becomes 7, 2 becomes 6, 3 becomes 5, 4 remains 4, 5 becomes 3, 6 becomes 2, and 7 becomes 1).
• Items 2, 3, 5, 6, and 7 are scored directly as marked (1 to 7).
• An overall policy fairness score is derived by computing the mean or sum across all 9 items. Higher scores reflect greater perceived fairness, higher parental deservingness, and stronger endorsement of institutional responsibility.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Fairness Perceptions of an Organizational Policy scale was developed and published in 1991 by Steven L. Grover in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The instrument and its constituent items are copyrighted by the American Psychological Association (APA). Under standard academic fair-use doctrines, the items may be utilized, reproduced, and adapted for non-commercial academic research and scholarly inquiry, provided appropriate bibliographic citation is extended to the original author and journal. For commercial workplace interventions, consulting applications, or publication within fee-based proprietary testing platforms, formal permission and potential licensing fees must be cleared through the American Psychological Association’s Rights and Permissions Office or through the Copyright Clearance Center.

References

• Adams, J. S. (1965). Inequity in social exchange. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 267–299). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60108-2
• Deutsch, M. (1975). Equity, equality, and need: What determines which value will be used as the basis of distributive justice? Journal of Social Issues, 31(3), 137–149. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1975.tb01000.x
• Grover, S. L. (1991). Predicting the perceived fairness of parental leave policies. Journal of Applied Psychology, 76(2), 247–255. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.76.2.247
• Greenberg, J. (1990). Organizational justice: Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Journal of Management, 16(2), 399–432. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639001600208

Items of the Scale